News
Diary
Film
Julia Rometti and Victor Costales
JOUSSE ENTREPRISE
6 rue Saint-Claude
June 10–June 15
Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, untitled, 2013, silver print on barita paper barita, 21 x 15 3/4". From the series “Incomplete Infinity,” 2013.
The title of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales’s latest exhibition, “El Perspectivista,” is a nod to Amazonian perspectivism, a movement developed in the 1990s by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which posits that animals and plants possess human souls. Rometti and Costales have been working collaboratively for six years in Latin America, particularly focusing their studies on the region and its alternative terrains of thought and history. Here, they have created a body of work including conceptual installations and detailed documentation that takes up shamanistic concerns while countering traditional Western notions of space and vantage point. Consider the black-and-white photographic series “Incomplete Infinity,” 2013, which features stark, rocky landscapes; each photograph is taken from different angles behind a set of bars. By imaging landscapes literally jailed by a framing device that creates a sense of scale, the artists subtly begin to tug at the viewing standards imposed by centuries of Western artistic culture. Structures are collapsed and perspectives opened.
Amplifying this theme is “Americanas,” 2013, also a series of black-and-white photographs. Here, the artists focus on agaves to the extent that they seem less like plants and more like camouflaged human beings. As such, “Americanas” evokes one of the key strands of perspectivism, that the natural world possesses energies and powers that might engender strategies for living in a more ecological and nonhierarchical environment—a sentiment echoed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in her presentation of Documenta 13 (i.e., the concept of the traumatized object, which springs from the cultural theory of “collapse and recovery”). These ideas naturally play into tenets of shamanism, blurring distinctions between what is considered magic and what is considered objective reality, alive or inanimate. In L’Inconsistance des Pierres Sauvages (The Inconstancy of the Savage Stones), 2013, two projectors show slides of volcanic stones on neutral backgrounds, which the artists also display in the form of two real rock specimens in another work included in the show. The volcanic stones are presented as at once physical and immaterial beings, and in a manner that is quasi-scientific, even classificatory. At play here is the possibility of streamlining the potential of mystics into the tangible world of lived, material experience.
— Caroline Hancock
“The Lie and the Powerpoint”
SHANAYNAY
78 rue des Amandiers
May 11–June 15
Liam Gillick, Benoît Maire, and Falke Pisano, The Lie and The Powerpoint (detail), 2013, video projection, PowerPoint with audio, fish decal, canvas, plastic, wood.
The latest addition to Parisian project space Shanaynay’s innovative exhibition program, “The Lie and the Powerpoint” stages a unique encounter between the art of Liam Gillick, Benoît Maire, and Falke Pisano. Rather than presenting three separate works on a common theme, it amalgamates the three participants’ ideas and intentions into a single piece. Like these artists’ previous cooperative endeavors—whether with other practitioners or each other—it implies the relinquishment of individual authorship and expression, while confirming that collaboration has become, as critic Godfrey Worsdale has pointed out, a kind of pseudomedium, alongside performance and installation.
Echoing the three artists’ shared interest in the written word, the work itself revolves around a text delivered as a PowerPoint presentation. Ringtones issuing from a speaker announce, muezzin-like, the start of the presentation, inviting visitors to gather round. An illustration projected on the ceiling simultaneously with the sounds references Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Owl and the Pussycat”—a title that resonates with that of the exhibition, suggesting that the text to follow will be of similar tenor. Consisting of a dialogue between two anonymous characters—the first of whom expresses himself in bold and the second in a regular typeface—the text reveals itself to be peppered with typos, non sequiturs, and contradictions. The fact that the statements in bold are as confusing as the rest of the text questions the implicit authority of bold over regular typefaces. Meanwhile, the nonsensical nature of the dialogue as a whole undermines the credibility of the PowerPoint itself—by showing it up as a medium that peddles fictions as truths. Trenchant and to the point, “The Lie and the Powerpoint” also evacuates such superfluous considerations as who did what and why. Instead it invites the viewer to judge the work on show on its own merits—without doubt the most important question of all.